ESR and Thunderbird under KDE

A quick update about recent changes in Mozilla applications for openSUSE.

With the release of Firefox and Thunderbird 11 (and Seamonkey 2.8) the older versions (10) got obsolete as always. But Mozilla created ESR (Extended Support Release) for Firefox and Thunderbird based on versions 10 and will maintain them for a longer time. Please read the FAQ about the details. For openSUSE we will not switch to these versions for different reasons but I’ll provide these from the buildservice repository mozilla. You should be able to install the current versions (10.0.3) of Firefox and Thunderbird by choosing firefox-esr or thunderbird-esr (there is also xulrunner-esr) in your package manager if you added that repository before. Please note that this is opt-in only and it’s not possible to install latest normal version and ESR versions in parallel. They are using the same profile directory and therefore I didn’t give them a separate installation directory neither. It’s also a bit risky to jump between ESR and normal versions because of the profile. So as normal version gets higher every six weeks the riskier to jump back and forth. Basically those ESR versions should probably be used only if really necessary but I still wanted to provide that possibility. If you install the ESR versions and found issues please let me know. Because of the renaming and parallel usage of the branding packages I might have missed some packaging foo to make updates in every case smooth.

A similar topic is about Firefox 3.6 and Thunderbird 3.1. The latest round of updates (3.6.28 / 3.1.20) was most likely the last one and people should start switching to more recent versions. That also means that 11.4 will get Thunderbird 12 as replacement for 3.1.20 with the next round. Other versions are already on the latest packages. (Evergreen will likely switch to the ESR versions btw.)

And about the last announcement (from my “quick update”) people might notice that Thunderbird 11 now got at least some of the KDE integration from Firefox as people kept pinging me about it. (And Firefox’ KDE integration is also back for the official updates!)

I have not heard good arguments to do it. Basically the same reasons as stated here: http://www.chriscoulson.me.uk/blog/?p=111 . If someone thinks that would be the right way to go I’m open for a discussion on the opensuse-factory mailing list.